Based in Milwaukee, Olympus Mascots has made custom mascot costumes since the 1960s. Craftspeople spend 60 to 120 hours on each costume — from concept to finished product — creating high-quality mascots for schools, sports teams and organizations nationwide. With a focus on quality and creativity, they bring characters to life with every design.
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Inside the workshop where mascots come to life
Brian Adams: Olympus Mascots was created at some point back in the 1960s. We have 250-ish total employees.
Amber Micoliczyk: They reached out to me and they’re like, “Hey, do you wanna be a mascot sewer?” And I’m like, “I have never heard of anything like that before, so sure, why not?”
Unidentified Speaker 1: You just kinda have to move your hands and hope for the best. Simply no other job like this I can think of.
Unidentified Speaker 2: The most important thing, I think, is to have fun.
Unidentified Speaker 3: So I’m a little bit like a superhero, in a way. [laughs]
Unidentified Speaker 4: You have everybody in the stadium looking at you, and you just run out. It’s a big responsibility, I would say.
[sewing machine clacks]
[playful music]
Brian Adams: We’ve probably done 25,000 to 30,000 mascots through the years.
Steve Deau: We did a forklift, like a wearable forklift costume. And it had the forks in the front that just kinda went up and down. And a hidden button on the other side for, like, the backup noise. Full-body robot. [electronic noises] Top to bottom. The Racing Sausages come through here. We probably make new ones every, I don’t know, five years.
Unidentified Speaker 5: We’re working on a very high-profile project right now that I can’t tell you about.
[machine buzzes]
[sanding]
Brittany Jacob-Thacker: Most of our costumes are in between 60 to 120 hours, with the average of them being probably in the 70 to 80-hour range. We consider, like, the performer’s activity level. We go a lot by, like, height range too to make sure it fits, like, a certain height range of person. There’s a lot of different aspects that all kinda go into it.
Unidentified Speaker 6: So when I see the picture, I have to navigate how I’m going to make this a 3D thing. I go on to the mannequin, I start measuring out things so that I know what the proportions are so I know how to make something what it should look like on the form.
Brittany Jacob-Thacker: So a lot of it’s fur. We have fur, Tempo, double knit are probably the big ones that we use. I particularly like when we do fur costumes just ’cause it’s cool to put different colors together and different textures. [lion roars] [monsters exclaim]
Unidentified Speaker 7: We work with hundreds of customers every single year. Pro sports teams, collegiate sports teams, restaurants, brands, different characters, you know, representing everything down to even elementary schools.
[broom whisks]
Unidentified Speaker 8: It’s very strange, sometimes, to just be like, watching a Packer game or something, and a commercial comes on and it’s like, “Oh, I made that,” you know? It’s like, you know, it gives me a certain level of pride and just, like, this costume made it onto TV and looks pretty good. [chuckles]
John Sidem: Feels like art come to life. Like, our art that we’re working on here, you know, becomes this full-scale, realized thing.
Unidentified Speaker 9: And then, it’s like, you forget about all of that hard work, and you’re like, “Wow, like, this is what it comes down to at the end.”
Brittany Jacob-Thacker: The people that work here are just amazing. It’s the reason why I come back every day. It’s the reason why I have a smile on my face. It’s the reason why I love coming to work because it’s a great group of people and we get to make some really fun stuff.
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